Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/314

302 their food fails as a result of untoward seasons and go to others where there is plenty. The native tribes west of the Cascade Range could not do that, and therefore must have often been reduced in numbers by bad seasons, before they were known to the white race.

The condition of the natives as to surplus food and the scarcity of large game in the Columbia Valley, as found by Lewis and Clark, shows that the normal season left the then population little they could spare. The party may be said to have run a gauntlet against starvation in their journey from the Rocky Mountains to the mouth of the Columbia. They saw few deer, and no antelope or elk. Salmon and dogs were their chief purchases from the Indians, and they ate of the latter till some of the men got to prefer dog flesh to venison. The salmon grew rancid and mouldy under the influence of the warm wet winter, and made the men sick. Their hunters, in what was forty years later the best elk range in Oregon, often failed to meet their daily wants, and sometimes killed their game so far from camp that it spoiled in the woods. So that when they learned that a whale had been thrown on the beach, at the mouth of the Nehalem, they went thirty miles, aiid with difficulty succeeded in the purchase of three hundred pounds of whale blubber.

They stayed at their winter camp until the latter part of March, 1806. The game had left their vicinity; they exhausted the surplus of the Indians near them, so they started on their return journey in order to reach the Chopannish "Nation," with whom they had left their horses,